George Santayana - The Life of Reason

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That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

George Santayana
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

George Santayana
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

George Santayana
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

George Santayana
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

George Santayana
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

George Santayana
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

George Santayana
Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

George Santayana
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

George Santayana
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

George Santayana
So in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.

George Santayana
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

George Santayana
Knowledge is the recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

George Santayana
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

George Santayana
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

George Santayana
[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

George Santayana
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

George Santayana
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.

George Santayana
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

George Santayana
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

George Santayana
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

George Santayana